Tag Archives: human

Somewhat closer to home

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Neil Armstrong, the first person to set foot on the moon, thinks humanity should stop neglecting the space environment much closer to Earth.

The United States dropped most of its test flights in the stratosphere and suborbital space after figuring out how to send humans to low-Earth orbit and the moon, said Armstrong, who stepped onto the lunar surface during NASA’s Apollo 11 mission in July 1969. He thinks it’s time for that to change.

“In the suborbital area, there are a lot of things to be done,” Armstrong said here Monday (Feb. 27) during a presentation at the 2012 Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC-2012). “This is an area that has been essentially absent for about four decades, since the X-15 finished its job.”

The X-15 was a rocket plane that took to the skies 199 times between 1959 and 1968, setting numerous speed and altitude records along the way. Armstrong was at the controls for some of those flights; before becoming an astronaut in 1962, the moonwalker was a test pilot for NASA and its predecessor institution, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

The test flights of the X-15 and other experimental craft of the era helped pave the way for future vehicles, such as NASA’s iconic space shuttle. Further investigation and exploitation of suborbital space — this time led not by the government but by private industry — could provide more technological and economic benefits to the country, Armstrong said. … (SPACE.com)

Whistelblower dies

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His reckless bosses sent seven people into their deaths. His “friends” and “colleagues” blamed him for all what went wrong with them afterwards.

Six months before the space shuttle Challenger exploded over Florida on Jan. 28, 1986, Roger Boisjoly wrote a portentous memo. He warned that if the weather was too cold, seals connecting sections of the shuttle’s huge rocket boosters could fail.

“The result could be a catastrophe of the highest order, loss of human life,” he wrote.

The memo was meant to jolt Morton Thiokol, the company that made the boosters and employed Mr. Boisjoly. In July 1985, a task force had been formed, partly on Mr. Boisjoly’s recommendation, to examine the effect of cold on the boosters. The effort, however, had become mired in paperwork, procurement delays and a rush to launch the shuttle, according to later investigations.

Meanwhile, his apprehensions only grew. The night before the Challenger’s liftoff, the temperature dipped below freezing. Unusual for Florida, the cold was unprecedented for a shuttle launching, and it prompted Mr. Boisjoly and other engineers to plead that the flight be postponed. Their bosses, under pressure from NASA, rejected the advice.

The shuttle exploded 73 seconds after launching, killing its seven crew members, including Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher from Concord, N.H.

Mr. Boisjoly’s memo was soon made public. He became widely known as a whistle-blower in a federal investigation of the disaster. And though he was hailed for his action by many, he was also made to suffer for it. … (New York Times)

Face Space Race

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NASA unveiled its first online space trivia game today (Jan. 30), a Facebook app that allows multiple players to compete for cosmic bragging rights.

The free game, called “Space Race Blastoff,” is a mix of Space Camp and “Jeopardy!” that pits players against one another in a quiz on NASA and space exploration history. Players with enough correct answers can earn award badges emblazoned with NASA astronauts, spaceships or astronomical objects, NASA game designers said. …  (SPACE.com)

Into the real world

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NASA’s chief climate scientist James E. Hansen built his career studying Earth’s atmosphere and modeling humans’ potential impacts on climate. Then he realized that laboratory work wasn’t enough. Hansen never thought his decision to study atmospheric models would lead to his arrest. But there he was in handcuffs this summer, protesting at the White House against a pipeline that would carry crude oil from Alberta’s oil sands to the Gulf of Mexico.

It wasn’t the first arrest, either. Hansen, who has directed NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies for 31 years, earned the sobriquet “father of global warming” after testifying before Congress in 1988 on the dangers of global warming. He appeared again in 1989. Then he quietly returned to his work, turning aside television and media requests for the next 15 years because, as he said, “you have no time to do the science if you’re talking to the media.” … (Universe Today)

White colored home stretch

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  • The Milky Way is redder than most spiral galaxies, but when combined with its blue arms, its overall color is white.
  • Our galaxy is very typical in terms of the type and number of its stars, research shows.
  • The Milky Way’s overall color is about the shade of white halfway between an incandescent light bulb and the standard spectrum white on a TV.

Turns out the Milky Way is aptly named, with the overall color of our galaxy resembling the shade of fine-grained spring snow in early morning light.

Splitting the light into its component wavelengths, however, reveals a redder-than-average color for the Milky Way’s core, and sky-blue spiral arms.

The portrait, pieced together from 1,000 similar galaxies culled from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, shows the Milky Way as it would appear from perspective of another galaxy, albeit one whose inhabitants have vision similar to humans. …(Discovery)

To the Stars – the sequel

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A project to pave the way for humanity’s journey to the stars will be helmed by a former astronaut, Mae Jemison, already a pioneer in her own right. She will lead DARPA’s 100-Year Starship project, the BBC says, citing DARPA documents.

Jemison, the first black woman in space, was one of scores of people to submit proposals for DARPA’s ambitious project. It doesn’t seek to build an actual starship per se but rather a program that can last 100 years, and might one day result in one. As DARPA told us last summer, it’s more of a thought experiment than a construction project. The idea itself sparked some other pretty audacious proposals, including one by J. Craig Venter to send human genomes toward the stars and reconstruct them upon arrival. … (POPSci)

To the stars

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“Humanity’s adventurous, stubborn, mad and glorious aspiration to reach the stars” is the subject of Physics World’s lead feature in January.

Sidney Perkowitz, Candler Professor of Physics Emeritus at Emory University, Atlanta, US, reports from the 100 Year Starship Study (100YSS) conference and discusses the challenges that interstellar travel presents.

With current propulsion technology only able to move spacecraft at 0.005% of the speed of light, a one-way trip to the star system nearest our Sun, Alpha Centauri, would take 80,000 years to travel the four light-years to our nearest stellar neighbours. … (IOP)